I'll just sum up all three books I finished reading on January:
I mentioned reading the first book of
How to Train Your Dragon by Cressida Cowell earlier in
another thread at the beginning of the month, and I'm still surprised how quickly of a read it was in comparison to the other two books I'll cover shortly. Perhaps because between the two, one is a fantasy novel for a more adult audience, while the other is a light marine zoology book focused on a particular species of cephalopods. With that said, I thoroughly enjoyed it, and I have a penchant to read it again, and buy Book 2 and read that as well. I might just buy a hardcover for the first one because I prefer books that way.
Two other books came to my house while I was reading
HTTYD, and once I was done with that, I went straight into one of them.
Rise of the Exile — the first book of the
A Shadow of the Tyrant King trilogy of novels by a YouTuber famous for making comedic atheist animations, known as "DarkMatter2525", or JD Matter. Funnily enough, he made these books
years before YouTube was even created, but never published them. Now he has two of them published, and
are available on Amazon, with the
first book being free audibly on his channel. I tuned in every Friday from mid-October, all the way to December 1st (he uploaded ten parts, encompassing five chapters per part, on every Friday). I decided I had to get my hands on a physical copy, and I did. It does start a bit slow at the beginning, as the story explores multiple characters, mainly the protagonist, through their childhoods. By the end, they're adults, yet they've been in many dangerous encounters throughout the story. I can't do it justice; give the first two parts on the playlists a listen and determine if this series is for you.
The Soul of an Octopus by Sy Montgomery was the companion book that came in the same package as
Rise of the Exile, and definitely took up most of January, in terms of book reading. I have had a fascination with cephalopods for a good year or two, and I was immediately drawn by the title, because octopuses (NOT octopi) are still somewhat poorly-studied, and in turn, poorly-understood. Criticizing the book for being "light on the science" misunderstands what the very title of the book entails, because many laypeople either don't have an understanding of these molluscs, or don't care to learn about the subtle emotions these creatures have. These books exist to shed light on this, and remind people that animals are more like humans than realized, because humans themselves,
are animals. There are so many highlights I could point to, such as
how the first octopus, Athena, died before the author could know if she recognized her or not, because octopuses
do recognize people: their faces, smell; everything. Octopuses taste things with their arms — NOT "tentacles", but
arms. They are fantastic escape artists, and, like their squid and cuttlefish cousins, are masters of camouflage and can change within 200 milliseconds (as fast as a human blinks, basically). Lots of what was stated about the octopus, I knew beforehand, but it doesn't make any of these factoids any less fantastic to read about. The author relays personal experiences she, or her friends at the New England Aquarium have faced, and relates these to octopuses, giving this entire book something of a poetic prose to it. Octopuses truly are amazing creatures.
I already mentioned the
SotT trilogy being two thirds of the way complete:
And I mentioned I'm buying this book, too:
And yet, Sy's has already written
another book about the eight-armed cephalopod which is set to release on March 19th of this year, titled
Secrets of the Octopus.
Can't wait to comb through all of these sequels.
